The Green New Deal isn't too big. It's not nearly big enough. - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Every other rich country also needs to make similar cuts, immediately. The developed nations with large emissions (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Britain and others) can afford their own Green New Deals; perhaps they can be persuaded to do their parts, if we do.
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developing nations — such as India, Pakistan, Ecuador and Malaysia — aren’t going to unilaterally constrain their own economies. If carbon-based energy sources help them compete in the global marketplace, that’s what they’ll use — unless, economists say, they get financial help to develop sustainably, with industrialization powered by renewable energy instead of oil, gas and coal. And there’s only one place they can get that help: from wealthy countries like ours. Giving them cash needs to be part of any Green New Deal.
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In the poorest developing countries, where many people live without electricity or other basic necessities, it is unrealistic to expect emissions to drop from their already low rates in the next decade. Some of these countries, including India, Indonesia and the Philippines, are very populous, and their industrialization could cause emissions to skyrocket.
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The next president could go further and tell allies such as Germany, Japan and Canada that their status as major trading partners protected by the U.S. security umbrella is now contingent upon their making steep emissions cuts.
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In the Paris negotiations, developing nations were explicitly open to making more ambitious commitments if developed countries contributed to making them happen.
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Rich countries industrialized with fossil fuels, developing industries powered by coal, delivering fossil-fuel-based electricity and heat to homes, and building transportation systems that run on the internal-combustion engine. In following this path, these countries chewed through most of the planet’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas that could be spewed until global temperatures warmed by 2 degrees Celsius
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The United States has contributed about 26 percent of the world’s cumulative emissions, and the 28 nations of the European Union are responsible for only slightly less.
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if Americans had been restricted to emitting a proportional share of a global carbon budget that capped warming at 1.5 degrees, we would have blown through that limit in 1944.
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mitigation: subsidies for renewable-energy deployment and storage, electrical-grid modernization, and other means of reducing emissions
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adaptation, which means preparing societies and their infrastructure for the effects of climate change, such as building flood walls to hold back higher sea levels or retrofitting buildings to withstand more severe heat waves.
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coverage for loss or damage: compensation for people whose homes become uninhabitable or whose livelihoods are destroyed by climate change.
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“climate justice,” which also includes providing support to marginalized communities that are disproportionately affected by climate change in rich countries.
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Last year, at a climate summit in Poland, India reiterated its openness to doing more if it were adequately subsidized, and an organization of the 47 least-developed nations echoed that plea.
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Nobody knows how big the ultimate U.S. number will need to be; it depends on how many rich countries pitch in, and how much they give, and how much help poorer countries need to modernize in eco-friendly way
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to stay below 2 degrees of warming, by 2030 the global economy needs to give a “green” makeover to the $5 trillion per year spent worldwide on sectors such as agriculture, energy, transportation, construction and heavy industry.
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his may be toxic for American voters. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly accept the science of climate change, are increasingly worried about it and in theory support the notion that the government should address it — but they are more divided in their willingness to actually pay for climate action
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The United States may have a narrow opportunity to pay down some of its historical debts, stem the tide of future climate refugees and manage the political instability that extreme warming would cause. The last chance came in 2009-2010, but the Senate failed, in part thanks to Obama’s bungling of the negotiations, to pass even domestic climate legislation
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The leaders of developing nations aren’t suckers, and they know how dire the problem is. They have something rich countries want (emissions reductions), and they’d be fools to just give it away for free, even if they could. If we want them to succeed, it’s going to cost us, and we’ll need to move quickly. The science is clear: We do not have another decade to waste.